The Quotable Chesterton: The Wit and Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton

Summary

G. K. Chesterton was a literary giant of his age. With an exceptional intellect, he wrote about history, politics, economics, philosophy, social and literary criticism, and theology. He published essays, novels, biographies, short stories, and poetry, and the Christian classics Heretics, Orthodoxy, and The Everlasting Man, which C. S. Lewis credits as instrumental in his conversion to Christianity.

With much of his finest material out of print or hard to find, modern readers have long needed a standard collection of his best thoughts. Kevin Belmonte’s The Quotable Chesterton brings them to you arranged alphabetically by topic, with complete original source documentation.

There are entries from Adventure to Cheese, Politics to Émile Zola, interspersed with essays about Chesterton’s life and times. Hundreds of passages drawn from Chesterton’s fiction, poetry, essays, and other books showcase a man the New York Times hailed as a “brilliant English essayist” and George Bernard Shaw called a “colossal genius.”

Endorsements:

“There isn’t a writer who gets me pacing and smiling and thinking like G.K. Chesterton. His every paradigm shift is an adjustment to my mental compass, and so a gift.” —DONALD MILLER, author of the New York Times bestsellers A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and Blue Like Jazz

“Over the years, I have delivered thousands of lectures, speeches, talks, and sermons; I have written hundreds of articles, essays, books, and reviews; it is an exceedingly rare occasion when any of them should fail to contain the words ‘Chesterton once said.’ Kevin Belmonte here reveals that fountain of wit, wisdom, and wonder, G.K. Chesterton, in all his irresistibly, irrepressibly, quotable splendor.”—GEORGE GRANT, Pastor, Parish Presbyterian Church, and Chancellor, New College Franklin

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The Quotable Chesterton - Kevin Belmonte

CHESTERTON

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Over the whole landscape lay a luminous and unnatural discoloration, as of that disastrous twilight which Milton spoke of as shed by the sun in eclipse; so that Syme fell easily into his first thought, that he was actually on some other and emptier planet, which circled round some sadder star. But the more he felt this glittering desolation in the moonlit land, the more his own chivalric folly glowed in the night like a great fire.¹

No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy.²

CONTENTS

Editor’s Note

A Fixture of the Times

An Introduction to G. K. Chesterton

The Quotable Chesterton from A to Z

Reasons for His Hope

Chesterton the Apologist

The Father of Father Brown

Chesterton as a Mystery Writer

Wielder of the Facile Pen

Chesterton the Essayist

Radio Dramatization

Mr. Welles and Mr. Chesterton

The Edwardian Dr. Johnson

Chesterton as a Man of Letters

Always a Journalist, Always a Jester

Chesterton the Journalist

A Writer’s True Calling

Chesterton the Literary Critic

Unconventional

Chesterton the Novelist

A Lover of Wisdom

Chesterton the Philosopher

The Singer of the White Horse

Chesterton the Poet

Acknowledgments

Notes

EDITOR’S NOTE

All but twenty-five of the quotations in this collection are taken from works in the public domain—largely writings published between 1900 and 1914, the years when scholars generally agree that Chesterton was at the height of his powers.

Those familiar with Chesterton have long known what an important writer and thinker he was. For a good many years, there has been a need for a standard collection of his best thoughts, arranged alphabetically by topic, with complete original source documentation.

Such is The Quotable Chesterton, replete with chapter identification for each of the original sources cited. Editions of Chesterton’s works are legion, and differ widely in terms of pagination. This anthology will allow readers to know which chapters of various works have been consulted, regardless of the edition they have at hand. For consistency, British spellings have been used even when citing American editions.

It is hoped this book (containing some 870 quotations) will serve as both an introduction and a long-overdue anthology. Chesterton is too little read today—which is a great pity. Few men have written more widely, more ably, or more presciently. He has much to say to us still.

KEVIN BELMONTE

Woodholme

February 2010

A FIXTURE OF THE TIMES

An Introduction to G. K. Chesterton

When the New York Times first took note of G. K. Chesterton—in an article entitled Boston Notes, published in the Saturday Review of Books and Art on Wednesday, August 31, 1901—the man the world would one day know as GKC was just twenty-seven years old. The Times went on taking note of Chesterton for the rest of his life, quoting him, referencing him, or reviewing his books some 556 times in all—an astonishing number. When he died on June 14, 1936, the Times obituary for him was page 1 news—sent by wireless from the United Kingdom. The article described him as a brilliant English essayist,a master of paradox, and for more than a generation the most exuberant personality in English literature.¹ All this before the close of the first paragraph.

But it was not in words alone that the Times conveyed a sense of Chesterton’s standing in the world of literature. It used visual images as well, as in a 1916 review of three books profiling George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, and Chesterton, entitled Three Literary Giants of Today. Inset were three artist renderings of the writers so arranged as to form a kind of triptych. The implication was clear: these three writers were leading literary lights, and they all belonged in the same conversation.²

George Bernard Shaw called his great friend Chesterton a colossal genius³ —and it is beyond question that Chesterton was a writer of extraordinary gifts. During a five-year period, 1903–8, he published six books, many of which are now widely acknowledged as classics: two acclaimed literary studies, Robert Browning and Charles Dickens; a novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill; a suspense thriller, The Man Who Was Thursday; and two works of apologetics, Heretics and Orthodoxy. In fact, 1908 proved his annus mirabilis. For in that year, he published both The Man Who Was Thursday and Orthodoxy. By this time, he was a preeminent man of letters. His writings from this period sparkle with creativity, originality, and a wisdom far beyond the age of a man who had only just entered his midthirties by the time the last two works above were published. It was as the Times had stated in its review of Robert Browning: here was a fresh and original mind.⁴

Within a few years, literary references to Chesterton started cropping up in books by other authors—and not just any authors. F. Scott Fitzgerald referred to The Man Who Was Thursday in the pages of his first great novel, This Side of Paradise.⁵ Not to be outdone, Fitzgerald’s great literary rival Ernest Hemingway wrote Chesterton into The Three-Day Blow, a story in one of his early and best works, In Our Time—published during his expatriate years in Paris in 1924:

I’d like to meet Chesterton, Bill said.

I wish he was here now, Nick said. We’d take him fishing to the ’Voix tomorrow.

I wonder if he’d like to go fishing, Bill said.

Sure, said Nick. "He must be about the best guy there is.

Do you remember ‘Flying Inn’?"

If an angel out of heaven

Gives you something else to drink,

Thank him for his kind intentions;

Go and pour them down the sink.

That’s right, said Nick. I guess he’s a better guy than Walpole.

Oh, he’s a better guy, all right, Bill said.

But Walpole’s a better writer.

I don’t know, Nick said. Chesterton’s a classic.

Walpole’s a classic, too, Bill insisted.

I wish we had them both here, Nick said. We’d take them both fishing to the ’Voix tomorrow.⁶

Chesterton achieved success in every form of writing he turned his hand to. Chesterton was also a highly visible public personality, and he took the stage in a variety of roles—epic debates with George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells,⁷ frequent stints as a presenter on the BB C (his resonant and expressive voice making him popular), and as a lecturer whose services were much in demand.

Chesterton was a man of ample girth—six feet four inches tall and tipping the scales at three hundred pounds. His great size, tradition holds, led to a famous exchange during World War I. At this time, a lady in London is said to have asked why he wasn’t out at the Front. His reply: If you go round to the side, you will see that I am.⁸

Yet at the back of it all—that is to say, at the heart of the matter—was Chesterton’s faith. No one has ever talked about God as he did, mingling laughter, creativity, intellectual acumen, eloquence, imagery, and power. Chesterton’s vibrant curiosity seemingly encompassed every conceivable subject, and on whatever subject he chose to write about, God was there.

Doubtless, Chesterton was a great apologist for the faith, but the ways in which he gave voice to that faith extended far beyond specific books on apologetics. It touched, infused, and enriched everything he wrote. Words he once wrote of Robert Browning apply no less justly to him:

What [Browning] really was was a romantic. He offered the cosmos as an adventure rather than a scheme. He did not explain evil, far less explain it away: he enjoyed defying it. He was a troubadour even in theology and metaphysics: like the Jongleurs de Dieu of St. Francis.⁹

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author Garry Wills has famously observed that Chesterton was a jester.¹⁰ It was in this role as jester that André Maurois discerned Chesterton’s enduring importance:

Without his paradoxes, without his jokes, without his rhetorical switchbacks, Chesterton might perhaps be a cleverer philosopher. But he would not be Chesterton. It has been supposed that he is not serious, because he is funny; actually he is funny because he serious. Confident in his truth, he can afford to joke. . . . During an age of morbid rationalism, Chesterton reminded men that reason is indeed a wonderful tool, but a tool that needs material to work on, and produces nothing if it does not take the existing world as its object. . . . To Chesterton as to Browning, the universe stands constant, solid—wondrous, under all the theories built up by intelligence, each as different from the others as were the reports of the blind men on the elephant. In that universe, with Chesterton’s help we can grow deep spreading roots, and the shifting winds of the mind cannot drag us out of the soil for those brief and glorious flights that can only end in a quick fall.¹¹

But then it needs to be said as well that Chesterton was a jester who felt he had been given the answer to the greatest riddle of all: the riddle of the cosmos. The answer was Christianity—the philosophy, he wrote, in which I have come to believe. I will not call it my philosophy, for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.¹²

Some initially found all this talk about God off-putting, C. S. Lewis famously writing that prior to his conversion he found Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity.¹³ But then, Chesterton’s writings would eventually prove a powerful catalyst in the process of Lewis’s embrace of Christianity. "In reading Chesterton, as in reading [George] MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere—‘Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,’ as [George] Herbert says, ‘fine nets and stratagems.’ God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous."¹⁴ Lewis would later remember:

I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense. Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken. You will remember that I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive apart from his Christianity. Now, I veritably believe, I thought—I didn’t of course say; words would have revealed the nonsense—that Christianity itself was very sensible.¹⁵

Perhaps, in the end, it is best to let the New York Times have the last word as to how Chesterton’s faith infused his writing, and why this is of central significance to understanding his literary legacy. Mr. Chesterton talks about God, a Times review stated in May 1916, because God is the most interesting subject for conversation that there is.¹⁶

A

ACADEMIA

THOUGH THE ACADEMIC authorities are actually proud of conducting everything by means of Examinations, they seldom indulge in what religious people used to describe as Self-Examination. The consequence is that the modern State has educated its citizens in a series of ephemeral fads.¹

ACCOMMODATION

WHEN MODERN SOCIOLOGISTS talk of the necessity of accommodating oneself to the trend of the time, they forget that the trend of the time at its best consists entirely of people who will not accommodate themselves to anything. At its worst it consists of many millions of frightened creatures all accommodating themselves to a trend that is not there.²

ACCOUNTABILITY

BOTH MEN AND women ought to face more fully the things they do or cause to be done; face them or leave off doing them.³

ADVENTURE

THE LIFE OF man is a story; an adventure story; and in our vision the same is true even of the story of God.⁴

ADVENTURES

ADVENTURES HAPPEN on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the chord of monotony is stretched most tight, then it breaks with a sound like song.⁵

THE PERFECT HAPPINESS of men on the earth (if it ever comes) will not be a flat and solid thing, like the satisfaction of animals. It will be an exact and perilous balance; like that of a desperate romance. Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.⁶

AGNOSTICISM

COMPLETE AGNOSTICISM IS the obvious attitude for man. We are all Agnostics until we discover that Agnosticism will not work.⁷

BUT NOW THE last gleam of red dies in the grey ashes: and leaves English men in that ancient twilight of agnosticism, which is so natural to men and so depressing to them. The echo of the last oracle still lingers in my ears. For though I am neither a Protestant nor a Pagan, I cannot see without sadness the flame of vesta extinguished, nor the fires of the Fifth of November: I cannot but be touched a little to see Paganism merely a cold altar and Protestantism only a damp squib.⁸

I HAVE DEALT at length with such typical triads of doubt in order to convey the main contention that my own case for Christianity is rational; but it is not simple. It is an accumulation of varied facts, like the attitude of the ordinary agnostic. But the ordinary agnostic has got his facts all wrong. He is a non-believer for a multitude of reasons, but they are untrue reasons. He doubts because the Middle Ages were barbaric, but they weren’t; because Darwinism is demonstrated, but it isn’t; because miracles do not happen, but they do; because monks were lazy, but they were very industrious; because nuns are unhappy, but they are particularly cheerful; because Christian art was sad and pale, but it was picked out in peculiarly bright colours and gay with gold; because modern science is moving away from the supernatural, but it isn’t, it is moving towards the supernatural with the rapidity of a railway train.⁹

AMERICA

WHEN I WENT wandering about the States disguised as a lecturer, I was well aware that I was not sufficiently well disguised to be a spy. I was even in the worst possible position to be a sight-seer. A lecturer to American audiences can hardly be in the holiday mood of a sight-seer. It is rather the audience that is sight-seeing; even if it is seeing a rather melancholy sight.¹⁰

PERHAPS THERE ARE other examples of old types and patterns, lost in the old oligarchy and saved in the new democracies. I am haunted with a hint that the new structures [of New York City] are not so very new: and that they remind me of something very old. As I look from the balcony floors the crowds seem to float away and the colours to soften and grow pale, and I know I am in one of the simplest and most ancestral of human habitations. I am looking down from the old wooden gallery upon the courtyard of an inn. This new architectural model, which I have described, is after all one of the oldest European models, now neglected in Europe and especially in England, it was the theatre in which were enchanted innumerable picaresque comedies and romantic plays, with figures ranging from Sancho Panza to Sam Weller.¹¹

SHALL I BLASPHEME crimson stars any more than crimson sunsets, or deny that those moons are golden any more than that this grass is green? If a child saw these coloured lights, he would dance with as much delight as at any other coloured toys; and it is the duty of every poet, and even of every critic, to dance in respectful imitation of the child. Indeed I am in a mood of so much sympathy with the fairy lights of this pantomime city, that I should be almost sorry to see social sanity and a sense of proportion return to extinguish them. I fear the day is breaking, and the broad daylight of tradition and ancient truth is coming to end all this delightful nightmare of New York at night.¹²

THEN, AS IT chanced, I looked across at the statue of Liberty, and saw that the great bronze was gleaming green in the morning light. . . . And then I suddenly remembered that this liberty was still in some sense enlightening the world, one part of the world; was a lamp for one sort of wanderer, a star of one sort of seafarer.¹³

ANARCHY

I WAS WAITING for you, said Gregory. Might I have a moment’s conversation?

Certainly. About what? asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.

Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the tree. About this and this, he cried; about order and anarchy. There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself—there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold.

All the same, replied Syme patiently, just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.¹⁴

WHAT IS IT really all about? What is it you object to? You want to abolish Government?

To abolish God! said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic.We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong.¹⁵

GABRIEL SYME WAS not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet; he was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred of anarchy hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion.¹⁶

DO YOU SEE this lantern? cried Syme in a terrible voice. Do you see the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron and preserved the legend of fire. There is not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats. You can make nothing. You can only destroy. You will destroy mankind; you will destroy the world. Let that suffice you. Yet this one old Christian lantern you shall not destroy. It shall go where your empire of apes will never have the wit to find it.

He struck the Secretary once with the lantern so that he staggered; and then, whirling it twice round his head, sent it flying far out to sea, where it flared like a roaring rocket and fell.

Swords! shouted Syme, turning his flaming face to the three behind him. Let us charge these dogs, for our time has come to die.¹⁷

THE FALLING FIRE in the great cresset threw a last long gleam, like a bar of burning gold, across the dim grass. Against this fiery band was outlined in utter black the advancing legs of a black-clad figure. He seemed to have a fine close suit with knee-breeches such as that which was worn by the servants of the house, only that it was not blue, but of this absolute sable. He had, like the servants, a kind of sword by his side. It was only when he had come quite close to the crescent of the seven and flung up his face to look at them, that Syme saw, with thunderstruck clearness, that the face was the broad, almost ape-like face of his old friend Gregory, with its rank red hair and its insulting smile.

Gregory! gasped Syme, half-rising from his seat. Why, this is the real anarchist!

Yes, said Gregory, with a great and dangerous restraint, I am the real anarchist.

‘Now there was a day,’ murmured Bull, who seemed really to have fallen asleep, ‘when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them.’

You are right, said Gregory, and gazed all round. I am a destroyer. I would destroy the world if I could.¹⁸

ANONYMITY

ANONYMOUS JOURNALISM IS dangerous, and is poisonous in our existing life simply because it is so rapidly becoming an anonymous life. That is the horrible thing about our contemporary atmosphere. Society is becoming a secret society. The modern tyrant is evil because of his elusiveness. He is more nameless than his slave. He is not more of a bully than the tyrants of the past; but he is more of a coward.¹⁹

APHORISMS

DESPAIR DOES NOT lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy.²⁰

IT IS ALWAYS simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.²¹

YOU SHOULD NOT look a gift universe in the mouth.²²

NO AMOUNT of tragedy need amount to treason.²³

IT IS BETTER to speak wisdom foolishly, like the Saints, rather than to speak folly wisely, like the Dons.²⁴

THERE IS A spirit abroad among the nations of the earth which drives men incessantly on to destroy what they cannot understand, and to capture what they cannot enjoy.²⁵

IT IS ONE of the simplest and silliest of the modern mistakes to connect the word old with the word stale or the word weary.²⁶

A DEAD THING can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.²⁷

THERE ARE TWO kinds of men who monopolise conversation. The first kind are those who like the sound of their own voice; the second are those who do not know what the sound of their own voice is like.²⁸

THE BIBLE TELLS us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies, probably because they are generally the same people.²⁹

ALL MEN ARE ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it.³⁰

THERE IS MORE of the song and music of mankind in a clerk putting on his Sunday clothes, than in a fanatic running down Cheapside.³¹

IT IS ABSURD to call a man cynical whose object it is to show that goodness, even when it is silly, is a healthier thing than wickedness when it is sensible.³²

WHEN A MAN begins to think that the grass will not grow at night unless he lies awake to watch it, he generally ends either in an asylum or on the throne of an Emperor.³³

APOLOGETICS

THERE IS IN modern discussions of religion and philosophy an absurd assumption that a man is in some way just and well-poised because he has come to no conclusion; and that a man is in some way knocked off the list of fair judges because he has come to a conclusion. It is assumed that the sceptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of scepticism.

I remember once arguing with an honest young atheist, who was very much shocked at my disputing some of the assumptions which were absolute sanctities to him (such as the quite unproved proposition of the independence of matter and the quite improbable proposition of its power to originate mind), and he at length fell back upon this question, which he delivered with an honourable heat of defiance and indignation: Well, can you tell me any man of intellect, great in science or philosophy, who accepted the miraculous? I said,With pleasure. Descartes, Dr. Johnson, Newton, Faraday, Newman, Gladstone, Pasteur, Browning, Brunetière—as many more as you please. To which that quite admirable and idealistic young man made this astonishing reply—"Oh, but of course they had to say that; they were Christians. First he challenged me to find a black swan, and then he ruled out all my swans because they were black. The fact that all these great intellects had come to the Christian view was somehow or other a proof either that they were not great intellects or that they had not really come to that view. The argument thus stood in a charmingly convenient form: All men that count have come to my conclusion; for if they come to your conclusion they do not count."³⁴

[AT ONE POINT in my life] I was much moved by the eloquent attack on Christianity as a thing of inhuman gloom; for I thought (and still think) sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin. Insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment, rather agreeable than otherwise; and fortunately nearly all pessimism is insincere. But if Christianity was, as these people said, a thing purely pessimistic and opposed to life, then I was quite prepared to blow up St. Paul’s Cathedral. But the extraordinary thing is this. They did prove to me in Chapter I. (to my complete satisfaction) that Christianity was too pessimistic; and then, in Chapter II., they began to prove to me that it was a great deal too optimistic. One accusation against Christianity was that it prevented men, by morbid tears and terrors, from seeking joy and liberty in the bosom of Nature. But another accusation was that it comforted men with a fictitious providence, and put them in a pink-and-white nursery. One great agnostic asked why Nature was not beautiful enough, and why it was hard to be free. Another great agnostic objected that Christian optimism, the garment of make-believe woven by pious hands, hid from us the fact that Nature was ugly, and that it was impossible to be free. One rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool’s paradise.

This puzzled me; the charges seemed inconsistent. Christianity could not at once be the black mask on a white world, and also the white mask on a black world. The state of the Christian could not be at once so comfortable that he was a coward to cling to it, and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it. If it falsified human vision it must falsify it one way or another; it could not wear both green and rose-coloured spectacles.³⁵

IT WAS HUXLEY and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me back to orthodox theology. They sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of

Reviews

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was a sharp-witted British author famous for his genial sense of humor and unconventional way of stating truth. This collection of quotes covers a wide range of topics, from snippets of Chesterton's novels to his literary criticism of such authors as Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. Chesterton was an accomplished essayist—which in my mind means that he had opinions on every subject and no compunctions about sharing them! He loved to debate (especially with his friendly enemy George Bernard Shaw), and his reasoned defenses of Christian doctrine continue to instruct readers today. His fiction explores such diverse genres as fantasy and detective fiction, and he also wrote plays and poetry. Chesterton's style is very distinctive, and after reading a good dose of his quotes I would find myself thinking in his language, turning the meaning of truth inside out to make old things seem new. He said once that paradox is just truth standing on her head to get attention, and he made full use of the strength of that technique. His literary presence (like his physical) is mammoth; his continuing influence on other authors is astonishing. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man was instrumental in C. S. Lewis's conversion to Christianity, and countless other authors have pointed to Chesterton as their benefactor in some way, including Dorothy Sayers, Mahatma Gandhi, Neil Gaiman, and more.It took me quite awhile to get through this book of quotes. This type of collection is hard to read all at once; as much as I enjoy Chesterton, I found that a little goes a long way. The same was true when I started reading his Father Brown mysteries. They're excellent, but are best taken one at a time. But I thoroughly enjoyed this excursion into Chesterton's thought, and I think a collection of his quotes has been long overdue.Witty, often hilarious even when dealing with serious subjects, with his eyes wide open to the beauty and poetry of the ordinariness of every day, and with ideas that are startlingly relevant in our postmodern world, Chesterton is not an author to miss. And if you are the sort of person who enjoys crystalline quotes as representative of an author's thought, Chesterton is a veritable diamond mine. Recommended!Disclosure: I received this book at no cost through Thomas Nelson's BookSneeze program. This review is my honest opinion of the work.

The Quotable Chesterton is an amazing compilation of articles (quotes) by G K Chesterton, an English writer and literary critic that were published in the early 1900's. I am a first-time reader and have come away with a deep respect for an extremely intelligent man who was a brilliant word-crafter.You'll find his quotes, and many of my favorites, covering a vast amount of topics such as Charity, Eternity, Greatness, Marriage and Music; just to name a few since Chesterton covers many passages from Politics to Fairy tales.What has impressed me the most in reading his book of quotes is understanding Chesterton's stand on defending the Christian faith and sharing his perspective and take on so many things that were so relevant to the 20th century.I found Chesterton to be a great poet and a good one at that. Indeed his writings are a blessing to mankind. He wrote, "If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey towards the stars."I can see why Chesterton `s book The Everlasting Man contributed to C.S. Lewis' conversion. Now I am a Chesterton fan. This is a great book, The Quotable Chesterton.